Extreme Tour or Mission trip? (Day2)

Today was another great day. Woke up and prayed.. read the bible, did my confessions and just ate a wonderful egg-sausage-potato casserole along with a cinnabon. Let me be honest, I’ve never had so much food while away from home. I’m literally overwhelmed with the amount of choices we have to eat at all times. I truly consider it a blessing from God; I don’t know how many people are without food… but I know there’s a lot out there. We started today by making an awesome extreme tour sign to be the backdrop to the stage we’ll be singing on throughout the tour. With the little amount of creative expertise that we all have, I was surprised that the guys from Runaway Symphany (Daniel and Jason), Ruth, Sarah and I could pull off such a fantastic job. We copied the extreme tour’s logo from a poster, made a grid on the computer, had Daniel sketch it onto the canvas, and then taped in the letters. Once we taped in all the letters, we painted the canvas with a dark green color outside in the parking lot. Sadly (who knows? Maybe it’s a good thing), the paint soaked through and left the extreme tours logo in one of the parking spaces outside the church here in Columbia. Lol. After our sign making, we left it outside to dry and came inside to have a bible study. Our bible study was to prepare us for our “hype” night,  a time we take to go into the city and simply talk/hangout with the locals, similar to something Jesus would do. The great thing about it is that the locals typically take an interest in what we’re all about because they can sense we’re not from there, therefore we can share the Gospel with them and invite them to our show the next day. Preparing us for this, our bible study had a lot to do with the question of why we’re really doing this music thing and how it’s time to leave the 99 to go after the one. Here we are, on a music tour… traveling city to city… doing what many musicians dream of… but willing to give merchandise away and not even get paid in order that someone may get to know Christ.  This is different, this is why we do music. After the study, we got dressed up into our coolest/craziest clothes and hit the city. I was in a group with Gary (a solo artist on the tour), Tony (Gary’s friend), and Jason (the great guy working the camera for the tour). Along with us came Scott and Angela, two people from the local church here. First off, we hit up the skate park. We simply walked up, chilled out and talked with the locals. I ran into some California natives and we hit it off talking about our home state… which eventually led to us talking about Church and inviting them to the concert tomorrow. After the skate park, we went to one of the most dangerous parks in town called Douglass park. Though we hear that there’s been numerous shootings at Douglass, we decided it would be a good venue to reach some folks. We walked into Douglass, and were totally surrounded by a ton of vehicles with people leaning on them… and a ton of people staring at us because we looked like foreigners. Aware of how we were being perceived, I asked these guys if they could rap. Interestingly enough, they said yes. Therefore we had a rap contest to the strumming of Gary’s great guitar. We continued to walk in the park, rap/sing with others . Having a camera man and being good (by the grace of God) at what we were doing definitely got their attention and therefore we used that attention to invite them to the concert tomorrow. I think the “free food” on the flyers we had gave the event a higher likelihood of being taken seriously too. Lol. After Douglass, we hit up downtown with the other teams we had split apart from in the beginning.  We sang up and down the streets of downtown Columbia with our guitars and our portable drums. It was a ton of fun and drew a lot of people to come and watch. We especially met this amazing girl named Natasha, who has a beautiful testimony and heart. She moves around often, has been an addict, been pregnant due to a rape, battled disease, been locked up, lost contact with her first born, seen much death, and so much more. She’s such a beautiful person though… it’s funny how God brings people into contact with Him when they’re looking for more.. and she is looking for more to the life that she lives. Therefore, we brought her back to where we’re staying and made her a part of all that we are. We let her eat with us, talk with us, laugh with us, and then we prayed with her. After she shared her testimony and let us pray with her, we all pitched in and got her a hotel room for the night. She deserves to be taken care of and I thank God for the hope she still has in her heart. I pray that she comes to know God, the healer of all that is in need of healing.  We also got to hear other people’s testimonies tonight. What a great day. The stories of others and what they’ve been through always challenge me and make me thankful to have God in my life. I seriously know that I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Christ. I am officially off to bed now; it’s 3 am and I don’t think I can go on much longer! Much love - Martay